"Honeywell, I'm home!"

Intro to Smart Home

For the first time since the mid-twentieth century—with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life—the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change.

Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into that void technology is rushing.

That tired old trope of “the house of the future” has been replaced by what is now called the “smart home.” The smart home is the network’s great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity. It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tati-style mise-en-scènes populated by absurd devices—the smart home is prime territory for farce—but it is also an ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the internet of things, according to which all our devices and appliances will join the network, communicating with us and each other.

To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical hacks who question the need for talking fridges and washing machines that you can program with your smartphone (“You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?”). Bruce Sterling argues that the internet of things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service providers.

Digital Surveillance

Given that data is the new currency,

the internet of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the network—Sterling focuses on the “big five” of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—to gain control of as much human data as physically possible. As the primary interface of the internet of things, the smart home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising out of the ground and into every one of our household appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance.

So are we in danger of overlooking a similar technical detail when it comes to the internet of things and the smart home? After all, before revolutionizing architecture, air-conditioning was slow to catch on (introduced first in factories and then in cinemas, where it was most cost effective). But there is one salient difference.

When air-conditioning finally took off as a domestic revolution, after the Second World War, millions and millions of consumers knew exactly why they wanted it. One cannot yet say the same of the smart home.

Multi-billion Dollar Industries

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Unnerving?

The internet-of-things evangelists proclaim that it is that most “disruptive” of phenomena: a paradigm shift. Bearing in mind Banham’s assertion that electrification was “the greatest environmental revolution in human history since the domestication of fire,” one naturally looks for equivalent consequences when it is claimed (no doubt accurately) that “the network is the new electricity.” So just how, exactly, will the internet of things revolutionize domestic life?

"Network is the new electricity."

The proposals to sell this revolution to the consumer are myriad and many splendored. But perhaps the poster product of this new domestic landscape is the Nest smart thermostat, which not only tells you exactly how much energy you’re using but can also learn your energy-use patterns and adjust itself according to your established preferences. The ostensible motive is environmental sustainability—Nest is helping us be better planetary citizens. But of course the reason why Nest was purchased by Google is that its smart thermostat is also a data hoover—a point we shall return to later.

The potential applications of the domestic internet of things cover a whole array of multi-billion-dollar industries, from security and healthcare to lifestyle and gaming. Thus Microsoft is developing kitchen counters that can recognize foodstuffs and display appropriate recipes. There are smart mattresses that monitor your sleep patterns by measuring your breathing and your heart rate. There are any number of smart locks now available that open when you walk up to the door and that can be programmed to let in your friends or guests (perfect for the Airbnb generation). There is cautious excitement about the potential of “ambient assisted living” for the elderly. A University of Manchester research group has developed smart carpeting that can tell when someone has fallen and that can even diagnose potential mobility problems from their footsteps.

Exposed to Corporate Entities

Added to this is the fact that the proliferation of smart, connected products will turn the home into a prime data collection node. It is estimated that there will be fifty billion wi-fi-connected devices by 2020, and all of them will collect data that is transmitted to and stored by their manufacturers. In short, the home is becoming a data factory.

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. The most obvious and often-raised concerns about all of this, of course, have to do with privacy. The mass harvesting of our data and metadata may not be equivalent to inserting CCTV cameras in our homes, but it is a form of digital surveillance.

One might ask whether we are returning to the ancient Greek notion of privacy that Hannah Arendt argued was not particularly private. That private realm was neither considered particularly noble. It was only centuries later that private property would offer “the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard.

Here, the private becomes not exactly public but exposed to other private, corporate entities. The trade-off that the tech companies will offer us in exchange for the smart home is efficiency. And we the consumer will be willing accomplices for the simple reason that we are becoming very used to paying for services with our “free” data—some of these products may even be supplied at next to no price in return for the data they produce.”

My Response:

While the author argues that smart homes are less about convenience, but more about control and surveillance, I consider smart homes are not distortion, but continuation of one of the greatest achievements in humanity. For sure, this alarming mass data collection has countless dangers, so is its potential. We can always whine about how the big tech companies are selling our data, and the fact that privacy is shrinking day by day. Though, let’s take a moment to reflect on its promise: voice assistants that let people with disabilities communicate with the world, smart locks that let parents check on if their children made home safely, and fall detectors that alert caregivers when an elderly parent is in danger. Needless to say, I gave only three examples.

The mathematician Clive Humby noted back in 2006, “data is the new oil, a resource that can be refined into immense value, but concentrated in the hands of those who control it.” Oil once gave us efficiency, wealth, and comfort but, in return, it left us pollution, dependency, and geopolitical conflict. Yet, no one argues we’d be better off without it. The air conditioning, which McGuirk claims inarguably one of the biggest domestic revolutions, is once built on the modern infrastructure fueled by “oil.” A smart home has countless number of smarter benefits.

I believe it’s another industrial revolution, another moment when power shifts.

And as always, the choice is to